Facebook Wants to Own Your Life, Not Imitate Amazon

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Facebook Wants to Own Your Life, Not Imitate Amazon

Facebook

Tech giants increasingly want to be the one and only stop for every aspect of your life. They want to be where you go to socialize with friends, where you go to read the news, and where you go to be entertained—without ever leaving their enclave.

They also want to be the place where you go to shop.

As first reported by BuzzFeed, Facebook announced this week that it has begun testing virtual storefronts on company Pages, so consumers can shop without ever leaving its app or site. Google too is now testing an e-commerce option to let mobile users make purchases directly in search results via shopping ads that pop up at the top.

"Buy buttons" and in-app purchases aren’t new. Facebook and Twitter have both been testing such buttons in ads since last year, and Pinterest rolled out buyable pins in June. These platforms may not be the first place you’d think of to do your online shopping. But the push into more naturally integrated e-commerce makes sense, even if the real goal isn't to become a retail hub.

These tech titans don’t necessarily want, or need, to replace a shopping site like Amazon, or even the IRL Walmart. But with millions of people signing onto Facebook and searching in Google daily, adding another seamless in-house service has bottom-line appeal. What's for an advertiser not to love about buying an ad that itself is also a way to make a purchase? As for consumers, in-app purchases mean you never have to leave, which is exactly what these companies want.

Friction Free

To shop online right now, consumers often have to hop from site to site. You may search deals in Google, read reviews on Zappos, and after all that, end up buying those shoes in a store in real life.

As my WIRED colleague Davey Alba wrote earlier this year, Pinterest users have long requested a way to click and buy directly on the site. If you see something on a social site and like it, it makes sense that you'd want to buy it now. The hassle of searching for it yourself can be a pain, especially if it's not clear what the product is. Giving your credit card info to myriad different sites is also not fun.

Google

Google and Facebook believe they can minimize that friction by suggesting purchases for you based on what you search for or what you do in your News Feed, respectively. When something you like pops up, all you have to do is click. The sites may already have your credit card info— you only have to add it once.

That frictionless experience is the dream, of course, for these tech titans and the advertisers they depend on who want to sell you more stuff. With buy buttons, they too may have a more direct way of seeing what you, the consumer, react to, and may be better able to assess data around searches that lead to purchases.

Where Google and Facebook most distinctly stand apart from Amazon, however, is how they make money from these sales. These are ad businesses, not retail business. And both see no need to stray from that winning formula. Google and Facebook have both said they will not be taking commissions for products purchased through their ads, and Facebook will not be charging a commission for sales in its Pages’ storefronts. That's a good deal for sellers. But for those merchants to be seen in the first place, they will have to buy their way to your eyeballs.

A Walled Mall

Creating a friction-free experience within the walls of Facebook and Google—not so much a walled garden as a walled mall—seems like a win for the companies, too. After all, both want to keep users engaged for as long as they can on their platforms in order to show you more of those profit-generating ads.

In fact, Facebook’s storefronts sound similar to another recent mobile-driven initiative launched by the company: Instant Articles. With Instant Articles—stories from traditional media outlets published straight to the site—Facebook users are able to load news significantly faster after they click than they would if links took them elsewhre on the web. In an interview on the site, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news.”

The company may be thinking that the same goes for shopping. By offering retail on Facebook's company Pages, shoppers can browse and buy all within the ecosystem of the speedy app. "Facebook wants to control users' entire experience," says Carmen Sutter, Adobe Social's product manager, who looks at how social data is collected and used. "You have news right there within Facebook, you can make purchases from Facebook, you can send people money." It makes sense that a shopping experience would come next.

Mobile Matters

We spend more of our time in Facebook and Google's smartphone apps than any other, according to a report from Forrester Research. At the same time, retailers have had difficulty getting users to make purchases on their phones, Forrester e-commerce analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says.

It comes as little surprise then that Facebook and Google's new products are being tested on mobile. Like Instant Articles, new ways to buy stuff without leaving their apps means Facebook and Google have another way to try to keep their users engaged and advertisers happy while cracking the problem of cajoling purchases out of mobile users. "From an advertising perspective, you'd have a broader reach because people spend more time, and there's a better chance of people interacting with you," Sutter adds.

But Mulpuru doesn’t think “buy buttons” will make a big dent. Facebook's company Pages as they stand now don't get a lot of engagement, she says. (Facebook would not comment on specific metrics for their buy button tests within ads, though a spokesman said early results have been "promising.")

“It’s going to be minor,” she says. “There are certain categories—books, maybe tickets—that may find some value.” But, for the most part Mulpuru adds, it’s not clear that consumers are in such a rush to make purchases without all the details in front of them. We may look online, but when it comes to shopping, we may still want to head to the real mall.